Through carefully educated in medicine and surgery I have never practiced either. The study of each continues nevertheless to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honorable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers amputated promptly and the more painful loss of my health for 1 have never been quite well since and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.